Field
The disclosed embodiments generally relate to techniques for accessing an online content-management system. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments relate to a system for supporting enhanced content-item searches in an online content-management system.
Related Art
Online content-management systems such as the Dropbox™ service that is offered by Dropbox, Inc., of San Francisco, Calif., are extremely useful because they enable users to easily access their online content from a number of different computing devices, including mobile devices. As these online content-management systems continue to grow in popularity, many people are beginning to use them to store thousands of content items, such as documents, photographs, music files and video files. Moreover, organizations such as companies are beginning to use these online content-management systems to store tens or hundreds of thousands of documents.
As users are able to access larger numbers of content items from an online content-management system, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to effectively search for relevant content items. In the past several years, a number of “desktop search” applications have been developed to facilitate similar searches through the files that are located on a user's computer system, such as Windows Desktop Search™ utility (which is distributed by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.). However, these existing desktop search applications provide little more than rudimentary keyword searches that do very little to determine the relevance of particular content items when generating a list of search results.
Hence, it is desirable to provide a searching mechanism for an online content-management system that goes beyond the capabilities of these existing desktop search applications to determine the relevance of content items during the searching process.